TwinIon

Are the things they're referencing ("the greatest rescue armada in history", "the unimaginable") from Star Trek: Nemesis or something else? I don't recall the end of that film very well, just that Data sacrifices himself for Picard.

Playdate is a new tiny handheld system from Mac software studio Panic, who has more recently moved into gaming with Firewatch and soon, Untitled Goose Game. It looks retro, but it's not a retro game system. It runs an OS designed by Panic and will only play games built for the platform. The Verge It sports a black and white screen, a d-pad, two face buttons, and oddly enough, a hand crank. While the screen feels like a throwback, the Playdate does have modern connectivity options, sporting Wi-Fi, bluetooth, and USB-C. When you buy the device for $149 you'll gain access to one "season" of 12 games. After powering it on, you'll start with one game and receive one new game for each of the next twelve weeks. Future seasons of games will be released depending on how sales go for the first. The games themselves are largely being kept under wraps, but developers of games like Qwop and Katamari Damacy have signed on. It's certainly an oddity, and I kinda want one. It feels like a throwback to those old nearly disposable mobile games from my childhood. At $50 I'd be all over it, at $100 I'd probably buy. At $150, if feels like a stretch. They do warn that stock will be very limited, so buyers will likely have to decide sight unseen.

The Vergecast had the lawyer suing Apple on and they were talking about the implications of this ruling for other platforms, specifically using the Xbox as an example.It seemed like the lawyer said that because you could buy physical Xbox games from different stores, that wouldn't fall under the same category as this ruling. When the hosts brought up the all digital Xbox, the conversation shifted, but it occured to me that you can still buy digital codes for games from other stores. It seems to me that alone satisfies the issue at hand. Even though only a single distribution channel remains, what this case is effectively litigating is the retail channel. As long as the potential for different stores to set prices exists, they would no longer have a monopoly on the sale of apps. Such a system should also satisfy Apple's requirements of security, as all apps would still go through their store. It would be interesting if they win this case and it effectively means that you either have to allow multiple stores on your platform (a-la Android), or you have to allow codes to be sold by third parties. From what I gather, this ruling certainly applies to the Xbox and Playstation (in that it would allow customers to sue), but it's less clear if it could apply to the Epic Store. This ruling also doesn't really address the fees that Apple charges developers. Separate lawsuits will determine that, even if they might be after kinda the same thing.

Reviews are coming out. With the first 73 reviews, it's currently at a 60% on RT. Most seem to like the actor who plays Aladdin well enough. After that impressions get pretty mixed.

Good games sell. How this is such a mystery to the companies that push out titles to hit arbitrary dates confuses me.

I agree. The base stations are annoying to setup, and took a good deal of trial and error to get right, but their existence isn't the thing that prevents me from using my Rift more often. Most of the time it's that my office is perfectly clear, and the tether to the PC is always annoying. There's also the matter of orientation. Both because of the wire and because of my 3 tracker setup, everything works best when facing in one direction, so if I'm playing something omnidirectional, it's annoying to have to reorient myself periodically.

Frostbite continues to impress. It's a shame it's so difficult to make good games with it. EA should take a lesson from Amazon and see if your product is good enough to compete on the market. Licence Frostbite out and see how the market responds. If no one wants to use it because there's no support or because it lacks features, then maybe those are reasons that your internal teams don't want to use it either. They can use that feedback to make the decision to make it competitive or not, but if you're pouring resources into something like this, they should justify that investment vs what's available.

I don't know if I agree with that. What we've seen is various people able to use magic with lots of different attributions. Berric and Melisandre use magic that they credit to the Lord of Light. The faceless men use magic they credit to the many faced god. Bran uses magic that is pretty attributable to the old gods (in so far as the weirwood trees represent a connection to the old gods), and I think the same could be said for the Children of the Forest and therefore the Night King and his army. The old lady that cursed Dany used magic she credited to the great shepherd. Qyburn and Dany both use magic, though neither is really attributed as far as I can remember. So we've seen a lot of people unequivocally use magic, and they've all credited various sources. The lord of light stuff is maybe more obvious because its usage happens when people are directly praying to it, but I don't think that makes it any more real than the great shepherd. Personally, I'm fine with that ambiguity. This is a world where magic exists, and various beliefs have popped up justifying that magic. Letting the "true source" of that magic seem relatively unknowable makes sense.

So, no real changes then. Although, politically, I think that the Dems actually come out on top here. They're willing to work on a plan, and he's not. I don't think it matters at all, but I think Trump comes off as the one not willing to play ball.

I've been enjoying the single player content. There's a lot of variety and I haven't been too consistently blown out by unbeatable draws by my opponents, even in heroic. I'm excited they've kept up their increased pace of nerfs. I've very interested in their new willingness to add in a single new card and buff old ones. It's a whole new paradigm for Hearthstone and the kind of thing that, if done regularly, could keep the meta fresh between expansions. Even if right now, it seems that there could be an issue with the new card:

As an owner of a Rift, I know I shouldn't buy the Quest, but I'm still tempted. I don't think there will be any game that the Quest will have that won't work better on the Rift, but the idea of playing without wires in different rooms, and being able to take it elsewhere, is really making me consider it.

Why? If a republican won the popular vote, they'd almost certainly have won the electoral college. Reverting back wouldn't help the democrats.

None of these should be made.

I haven't spent much time with a racing game in a long while, but now that I've been following Formula 1 I might actually give this one a shot.

I think for me, the reason that 1 is my favorite is that it has that small hint of emotional stakes. However silly or overblown it might have been, you understand John Wick's drive in that film. Chapter 2 felt less purposeful for that reason. He's reluctantly forced into doing a job, and then has to deal with a doublecross, but it just feels like he's lacking conviction in his task. With Parabellum, it's pure survival, so again, it's easier to feel his motivation. I was also surprised how much I actually cared about the other characters in 3. Of course, when talking about the emotional stakes of John Wick, we're measuring trace amounts in every film. But I still think that's why the first was so successful. Like in the Raid, you just need to feel his motivation just barely enough, and it's sufficient to allow you to enjoy all the insane (and really well filmed) action.

Trailer 2 is out. It's not too spoilery, but I doubt many of us need convincing to see this one.

I liked it better than 2, and while the action in 3 might be the best overall, I think the first remains my favorite.

As long as they keep making more and more money, there's no reason to expect they'll stop making em.

Scores high to low makes the most sense to me. It's the easiest to get a sense of the overall distribution of the reviews.

Something else I'll add, that ties into my wishes that they'd mentioned the possibility of more walkers/evil magic North of the wall, is that I wish they'd hinted at the idea that not everything got solved. Certainly things ended up pretty well for our surviving main cast, and sure, most of the folks in power seem to want the best for their people, but there's very little reason to think everything will stay happy in Westeros. Maybe it would have been more fitting for GoT to have that last small council meeting be about all the problems facing the realm. There's a horde of Dothraki to deal with, power vacuums all over the place, inexperienced new leaders running huge kingdoms, a King that hardly troubles himself with the fates of men, and one Kingdom that already succeeded. There's a new method for choosing rulers that has only worked once, and was done kinda at a whim. Maybe it would be too much of a downer to say "everyone is happy" and also "did this really solve anything?," but I feel like the latter sentiment is more Game of Thrones, and the elimination of any musical threat ties too much into the former. Perhaps that would have been too deeply unsatisfying for anyone to be happy with, but I also feel like that's the "reality" that this fantasy has pushed viewers to expect.

Anyone watched this yet? It's being pretty aggressively marketed to me on Twitter.

I wouldn't be surprised if Benioff and Weiss or Johnson end up writing/directing the first episode in their trilogies and then just produce the next two. I suppose Benioff and Weiss know what it's like to spend a decade working on the same project, but I don't know if they're so keen on signing up for that immediately. Johnson has said that he loved working on TLJ, but that's still a very different task than a whole trilogy, especially when you don't have JJ doing so much of the setup for you. Whatever happens, I'm still just excited to see some Star Wars break free from the Skywalker Saga. I'm looking forward to Ep 9, but I want to see Star Wars on the big screen free from the OT.

The domestic record isn't even close to in the picture anymore. I'm slightly surprised by how fast it's fallen off. Avatar's world wide record will likely fall, but it's going to be closer than I expected after the first week or two. I don't expect it's opening in any more countries than it already has, so it's even possible that Endgame doesn't break Avatar's $2B overseas gross, which underlines just how crazy that record is. It baffled me at the time, and it continues to baffle me just how Titanic and Avatar made so much freaking money.

I'm not convinced that this is the right move (by the US Govt). Huawei makes great laptops, is innovating quickly on phones, and was likely to be the provider of about 25% of the 5G equipment that small ISPs were going to deploy. Crippling them seems like it will be a very real harm to US companies and consumers, and we've seen no real evidence that such drastic measures are necessary. So either the feds are in possession of privileged info that they don't want to share, or this is just Trump being impetuous. I think the former is possible, but the latter is more probable.

This gives me a lot of hope for this project. Since Breaking Dawn, the most commercial project he's done was The Lost City of Z, which made $8.5M. He hasn't exactly been trolling for a paycheck, he's just been putting in great performances in lots of great little movies. If this is the movie that can pull him back into the spotlight, I'm hoping that means he sees something exciting about it. I think the most interesting aspect of Batman is that he's a fundamentally broken man, and Pattinson is more than capable of pulling that off. Even with how much I enjoyed War for the Planet of the Apes, I'm still pretty wary of any DC project. I'm much more interested now.